In ‘Dr. BR Ambedkar: Now & Then’, living through caste injustice and seeking a way out

In a research paper in the Economic and Political Weekly in May 2020, filmmaker Jyoti Nisha advanced an idea she referred to as “Bahujan Spectatorship” to describe how people from marginalised groups view popular films, which strip underprivileged “characters of their dignity and agency” and replicate “hierarchical structures of caste on screen”.

Since Bahujans have “never fit into the popular imagination of India”, Nisha contends that they have adopted “an oppositional gaze and a political strategy” that rejects “the Brahminical representation of caste and marginalised communities in Indian cinema”.

Bahujan Spectatorship is among the ideas in Nisha’s film Dr. BR Ambedkar: Now & Then (2023), which examines caste inequality down the ages through the lens of her personal experience.

It is one of the two documentaries that has been released on the streaming platform MUBI to mark Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar’s 134th birth anniversary on April 14. The other is Somnath Waghmare’s Chaityabhumi (2023), which focuses on the memorial at the site of Ambedkar’s cremation in Mumbai to highlight the centrality of the revolutionary anti-caste activist in the Dalit imagination.

Tamil director Pa Ranjith, who has dramatically altered the representation of Dalits in mainstream cinema, has presented both documentaries. Ranjith’s films are among the examples cited by Nisha as she explores the manner in which Dalits have been...

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